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Optimise your tweets with these five simple suggestions

Tomaximise a tweet’s effectiveness you need to use the 140 characters in the most efficient manner possible. This post offers five simple suggestions to optimise tweets for engagement and ultimately CTR.

The number one rule before applying these quick fixes is ensuring your tweet content is relevant to your audience. Although these are generic tips applicable to any industry your tweets must communicate the value of your product/service to your customers.

Start by putting the customer first and construct your tweets around them paying particular attention to language, writing style, and the call-to-action your customers will most likely respond to.

With that in mind here are the five suggestions:

1. Tweet length

The easiest and most frequently addressed issue, and also the issue where common sense plays its biggest part. Twitter is a fast-moving social network, people are often accessing from a mobile device and therefore more than likely to be on-the-go.

Keep your tweets snappy and succint. The longer a tweet the more time a follower will need to spend reading it. When you’re flicking through your twitter feed it’s simply easier to digest the shorter tweets than the longer tweets.

Optimal length suggested: 70 – 100 characters.

2. Hashtags

People (alright mainly my Dad) ask me all the time what hashtags are for and what their purpose is. Take the ‘hash’ away and what do you have? Et voilà, it’s a tag and nothing more.

The beauty of the hashtag is it lets others find your tweets based on a particular category. If you’re tweeting about cupcakes then #cupcake would be a sensible thing to include. This would get your tweet infront of anyone who is searching for #cupcake around the time you tweeted it and for longer if it gets retweets. Popular tweets linger around in searches for longer.

Don’t overdo it though, too many hashtags and a tweet will look spammy and just generally yucky.

3. URLs

Back in the day you had to use a URL shortener to maximise the characters available when inserting a link into a tweet. Nowadays Twitter does this for you, but there is still room to optimise the tweet further.

Bit.ly amongst other URL shortening services allow you to edit the jumbled up characters at the end that represent your link. This means you can show something more human, something that a follower can relate to and something that will stand out more. For example, consider the two examples below and note how RateSetter use the link bit.ly/ProvisionFund to direct followers.

Another suggestion that works as a branding tool is to tweet just the name of the website as Twitter now recognises it’s a link without the need for the HTTP prefix. I do this regularly as not only is it a link back to the website but it also drills home the name and for any RTs people will see a company name and not a shortened URL.

Note this only works for the shorter domains, if it’s too long Twitter will shorten it to a t.co link.

4. Imagery and rich media

A picture is worth a thousand words. Relate this to your tweets and it results in increased engagement as followers have a visual cue. Not only that but a good image, humerous (careful), factual or just attractive can tempt followers to RT and share with their followers.

Look at the below example of how Prezzybox used an image alongside a competition where followers needed to RT to enter. Perhaps one too many hashtags but the image being used shows Prezzybox trying to get optimum engagement.

This isn’t to say add an image to every tweet, but make it part of your strategy to include an image maybe once a day or at least weekly. After all, pictures can be worth a thousand RTs.

5. Interaction

Let’s not forget Twitter is a social network; the key word being social here. Prompt influencers in your industry to engage with you, mention a couple in key tweets, respond to a tweet mentioning someone who you think will agree/disagree.

Stir things up a little in a good way to get your tweets in user’s interactions feed.

Quick tip: to ensure followers see tweets mentioning others make sure you include the handle of the person you’re tweeting toward the end of the tweet. Handles at the front of a tweet indicate it’s a reply and will not be seen in a follower’s news feed.

Summary

Ensuring your tweets are as refined and optimised as they can be will lead to greater engagement with your followers. Use these simple suggestions to get a higher CTR from your tweeting and to build your following.

Companies are pouring billions of dollars a year into social media and influencer marketing campaigns, many of which target consumers on Facebook-owned Instagram, in an effort to parlay social engagement into sales.